genericmk writes: "NPR is running an interesting story about the unfortunate state of the aging programmers in the IT industry. The headline reads of aging IT workers opposing the H1B visa overhaul; the underlining reality is that large corporations claim shortage of IT talent and are bringing in large volumes of foreign staff. The staff is easier to control and demands less wage; indentured servitude is replacing higher cost labor."Link to Original Source

pigrabbitbear writes: "It's the most modern lament in retail: Brick-and-mortar shopping has gone the way of the dodo as everyone buys their junk online. But for the once-booming online gambling market, salvation may require a reversal of that trend. For one online gaming giant, buying a casino in Atlantic City is the first step to bring Internet poker back to the US.

In 2006, playing online poker for real cash was deemed illegal. While that didn't stop more serious players from playing, especially once the big hosts started funneling cash offshore, the FBI and DoJ's crackdown on April 15, 2011 did. The big trio of online poker–PokerStars, Full Tilt, and Absolute Poker–were all shut down, domains seized, and executives arrested on charges related to fraud, money laundering, and illegal gambling. While PokerStars and others continued operations in foreign, legal markets, the U.S. poker craze pretty much collapsed.

That doesn't mean the lucrative market has gone away. Now, the Rational Group, which owns both PokerStars and Full Tilt, may be hinting at a workaround: the company is looking to buy a struggling casino in Atlantic City. Rational faces a rather large mess of regulatory hurdles, but if it does end up acquiring the Atlantic Club Casino Hotel, it would have a huge foothold in New Jersey's young market for internet gambling."Link to Original Source

hypnosec writes: Keeping its promise from yesterday Ubuntu has announced an operating system for tablets dubbed ‘Ubuntu for Tablets’ that is says will work on tablets of any size. Advertised to work on both entry level tablets as well as high-end tablets with enterprise specifications, the operating system offers multitasking, safer sharing, instant launch of applications through the menu bar on the left, effortless switching between applications among other features. Canonical has put out specifications of the tablets that would be required for an entry level consumer Ubuntu tablet experience as well as High-end Ubuntu enterprise tablet experience.Link to Original Source

adeelarshad82 writes: Earlier today, HTC unveiled a revamped version of its One smartphone. The new HTC One boasts a 4.7-inch full HD 1080p display which is powered by a 1.7-GHz, quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 processor and a customized version of Android. The new phone includes support for NFC, Bluetooth 4.0, and DLNA for wireless streaming to a TV or computer. Among the several features highlighted by the company, HTC Zoe was the one which really stood out. According to HTC, the feature lets users shoot high-res photos that will turn regular camera rolls into a motion gallery of memories. Other big features the company talked up were BlinkFeed and BoomSound.

colinneagle writes: Thanks to cybersecurity firm Mandiant, we now have a video of a hacker believed to be linked to the Chinese military infiltrating and stealing files from unidentified English language targets.

The video comes as part of Mandiant's 60-page report, first reported by the New York Times, that claims China's military is responsible for cyberattacks on more than 140 foreign businesses, many of which are in the United States. In the video, a hacker is seen registering a Gmail account with a U.S. IP number, then verifying it with a phone number located in Shanghai. From the email account, the narrator says it is clear the attacker has used it for spearphishing, particularly "focused on military exercises in the Philippines." He then installs command-and-control servers, tests them, and, after an hour of failed attempts to issue commands to a victim backdoor (which the video omits), uses stolen credentials to log into an email account. Once there, he uses several tools to launch spearphishing campaigns and steal files.Link to Original Source

itwbennett writes: "Two years ago, Peter Sunde, who once ran the world's largest bittorrent site, was sentenced to 8 months in prison. Today, he lives a quiet life in southern Sweden trying not to get the attention of police, who, he says may have a warrant for his arrest. In fact, there is a room waiting for him at the Västervik prison, but Sunde is doing his best to stay out of it. In an interview with the IDG News Service, Sunde says there's only one thing he regrets: 'I should have told Gottfrid to encrypt his hard drive. That's where the evidence came from. Even though he works professionally with security, I should have told him,' he says."Link to Original Source

Vigile writes: "NVIDIA's new GeForce GTX TITAN graphics card is being announced today and is utilizing the GK110 GPU first announced in May of 2012 for HPC and supercomputing markets. The GPU touts computing horsepower at 4.5 TFLOPS provided by the 2,688 single precision cores, 896 double precision cores, a 384-bit memory bus and 6GB of on-board memory doubling the included frame buffer that AMD's Radeon HD 7970 uses. With a make up of 7.1 billion transistors and a 551 mm^2 die size, GK110 is very close to the reticle limit for current lithography technology! The GTX TITAN introduces a new GPU Boost revision based on real-time temperature monitoring and support for monitor refresh rate overclocking that will entice gamers and with a $999 price tag, the card could be one of the best GPGPU options on the market."Link to Original Source

An anonymous reader writes: Hollywood crime dramas are infamous for the scene when an
accused is taken to a local police station and permitted a single
phone call to
contact a relative or lawyer. While the storyline is myth — there is
no limit
on the number of phone calls available to an accused or detainee — Michael Geist reports
on a recent Canadian
case establishing a new, real requirement for law enforcement.
After a 19-year
old struggled to find a lawyer using the telephone, the court ruled
that police
must provide an accused with Internet access in order to exercise
their right
to counsel.Link to Original Source

alancronin writes: Similar to Fabien Sanglard's previous code reviews of other games such as the Quake and Doom line of games comes a review of the code base of Duke Nukem 3D (split out over 4 pages). This will be a very good read for anyone interested in understanding the mechanics of a highly addictive game or anyone that wants to learn more about game design.Link to Original Source

nk497 writes: "The vast majority of PCs sold by British PC makers are running Windows 7 — not Windows 8. PC Pro spoke to several PC builders, with some reporting as many as 93% of recently sold machines were on the older OS. One company initially sold its PCs with Windows 8, but feedback from users soon changed that. Customers quickly began to specify systems with Windows 7, those with Windows 8 "took delivery and wanted to change back to Windows 7" – a process the firm described as a "nightmare". Another firm found success by installing a "start menu" tool on Windows 8 machines, and others said the switch would have gone smoother if Microsoft has offered a Windows 8 tutorial or better explained the new OS."Link to Original Source

theodp writes: 'The lack of interest, the disdain for history is what makes computing not-quite-a-field,' Alan Kay once lamented. And so it should come as no surprise that the USPTO granted Google a patent Tuesday for the Automatic Deletion of Temporary Files, perhaps unaware that the search giant's claimed invention is essentially a somewhat kludgy variation on file expiration processing, a staple of circa-1970 IBM mainframe computing and subsequent disk management software. From Google's 2013 patent: 'A path name for a file system directory can be "C:temp\12-1-1999\" to indicate that files contained within the file system directory will expire on Dec. 1, 1999.' From Judith Rattenbury's 1971 Introduction to the IBM 360 computer and OS/JCL : 'EXPDT=70365 With this expiration date specified, the data set will not be scratched or overwritten without special operator action until the 365th day of 1970.' Hey, things are new if you've never seen them before!

blanchae writes: "If something happened like the movie: "The Day the Earth Stood Still" and an alien, who was omnipowerful like Klaatu, arrived to evaluate whether to thumbs up or thumbs down the earth and mankind. What would you present as mankind's greatest triumphs and accomplishments and why?"

another similar writes: Businessweek profiles a multi-year effort to trace a Chinese hacker to his roots — at PLA Information Engineering University in Zhengzhou. Interesting how falling into old habits can leave a trail for others to reconstruct.Link to Original Source

sotweed writes: The NY Times in Tuesday's paper is that a group in Shanghai is hacking against American companies and government agencies, and appears to be supported by and part of the Chinese Liberation Army. American intelligence officials have confirmed their knowledge of this organization. The Times says, "An unusually detailed 60-page study, to be released Tuesday by Mandiant, an American computer security firm, tracks for the first time individual members of the most sophisticated of the Chinese hacking groups — known to many of its victims in the United States as “Comment Crew” or “Shanghai Group” — to the doorstep of the headquarters of a People’s Liberation Army unit." Attention of the hackers is now turning to America's infrastructure: power grids, gas lines, waterworks, presumably via unsecured or inadequately secured SCADA systems.Link to Original Source